Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  The rhino raised its head. The horn was nothing. Then a small gray blob of putty detached itself from the rhino’s side. It was a calf, no more than six months old, if that.

  “Manamouki,” Kidogo breathed behind me. “Mtoto.”

  Ordinarily you don’t mind shooting a rhino cow if the horn is good, and quite often the horn is better on the manamouki than on the bull, apt to be longer and more symmetrical and less splintered from brawling. But this lady was too new-come to motherhood for us to leave a baby loose in the bush, even if her horn had been a marvel. Selby handed his gun back to Adam and took the camera from Virginia.

  “Too bad,” he whispered. “But the baby’s young enough so she won’t charge and leave it. Let’s go and take some snaps. You can cover me, if you will. Don’t shoot her unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  The cow raised her head wonderingly. The tickbirds were quiet on her back. The calf nuzzled irritably at her udders. The big stupid face swung back and forth, testing the wind, which was blowing directly at us. Her little pig’s eyes blinked weakly. She walked slowly toward us, still questing with her nostrils.

  There was a shallow pool of water in a half-formed donga between us and the cow. Harry had walked up to the edge of the water, and the camera was whirring. The rhino didn’t like the noise. But she couldn’t see us, and she couldn’t smell us. Harry kept taking pictures. I glanced back at Virginia, and she was following closely, frightened to approach but scareder still to stay behind. We had come to within thirty feet of the old girl now, and she was visibly upset.

  All of a sudden the tickbirds hopped straight up in the air. The old girl stuck out her nose and started a gallop, heading directly at us. Her tail was still up. She couldn’t smell, but she was fifteen feet from Harry, and she could make us out dimly with her poor, weak eyes. Harry whirred through the film in the magazine and pushed the palm of his hand gently backward. I had the big bead of the .470 resting on the sore spot and was wondering less than idly if the famous rhino ill temper would conquer the mother concern long enough to take this one across that twelve-foot strip of shallow water, in which case I should certainly have to make an orphan of the child.

  She made another half pass at a charge and stopped with her feet in the water. Harry was walking backward now, and out to his left so was I. The old girl muttered, tossed her head, checked her child, slewed off in a half turn, and stood rigidly, looking at us. The baby had come up and was butting between her legs. We walked backward another twenty feet or so and then turned, walking away but half facing her. After we’d covered a hundred yards, Harry handed his rifle to Adam. I gave mine to Kidogo. Harry gave the camera back to Virginia. Virginia was white. A lady rhino looms very large at thirty feet when you are on the ground.

  “I knew she wouldn’t cross that water,” Selby said. “Not and leave Junior unattended. A half-grown calf, yes, indeed. But not the baby. Never the baby. Shame it wasn’t a good bull.”

  Virginia was muttering, not unlike the rhino cow.

  “Yes, Virginia?” Harry said politely.

  “. . . idiots,” she said, with something bitter ahead of idiots. “Tormenting mother rhinos and taking me along to share in the fun. If there wasn’t any danger, why did I see my husband slip the safety catch on that damned cannon and square off at the lady’s neckline when she started to come at us?”

  “Pure precaution,” I said. “It’s an expensive camera. I didn’t want Selby to lose it when the foot race started. You know his reputation with rhino. He who looks and runs away . . .”

  “Something about the Duchess of Grafton, wasn’t it?” Jinny said. “Except here we’d no brawnches for the young man to send me to climb. Nothing but this lovely ooze.”

  “Seems to me there was another story about a half-grown rhino chasing this young man too,” I said. “All over the bars in Nairobi. Tell me, did you actually ever shoot a rhino?”

  “Not if I could run from one,” Selby said. “I leave the shooting to the clients. Let’s get back in the jeep and see if we can’t scare this lady into the bush. We’ve got to pass where she’s standing, you know. No other way to get around the point, and she seems a stubborn sort. Off we go.”

  We slipped and slid the jeep through the fecal ooze, sticking her once, twisting on our own tracks, and finally coming out just abaft the rhino cow and her calf. She was still standing close to the water’s edge, turning her head and testing the air. We came up obliquely in the car, and she picked up the scent and charged a small way, with very little heart in it. Harry swung the car. The wheels squeaked and slipped and slithered on the hardened gray crust of the reeking mud.

  “We’ll outmaneuver the old lady,” Harry muttered. There was quite a bit of muttering going on. In addition to Harry and the rhino, Virginia was muttering. So were Kidogo and Chabani and Adam. Playing with rhinos in open jeeps is fun if the ground is hard, but the way we were maneuvering there wasn’t any place to go except into the lake if she decided she didn’t actually want to take her child back into the scrub.

  Harry blew the horn. She swung her head at us again, facing us now, with her back toward the bush. The calf was beginning to totter into the thick low trees. Harry yelled and hit the door with his hand. The cow snorted. She made one more pass and then quit. She turned, rooting the calf ahead of her, and slowly and reluctantly walked into the bush. She gave one last snort and disappeared. We allowed her some time. We allowed her some time because we had to go through the bush she had disappeared into.

  “Tricky terrain,” Selby said. “Can’t have any fun with rhinos unless you work on a terrain you can trust. This stuff we’re driving on is suicidal. Never know when you’ll stick or stall.”

  “That’s nice to know,” Virginia said. “Lead on, warriors, and don’t mind me. I don’t mind dying of acute rhino horn through the floorboard of a stuck jeep. Let’s go seek some more thrills, tomboys.”

  We picked up the wildebeest-ostrich-zebra convoy again and meandered down the shoreline. My mouth was watering at the wildfowl. The ducks, black mallards mostly, were as tame as barnyard puddlers. They didn’t bother to get up and fly. They just lifted themselves briefly from the water and flopped down again, gabbling contentedly. I didn’t say anything about the shotgun. Lèse-majesté would be the best thing they’d accuse me of.

  We came down under the lee of Maji Moto. There was a broad green valley tucked under the mountain’s steep side, angling backward out of sight into heavy bush, a mile or more in length from what we could see, and a half-mile wide. It was rolling, lovely green, cool and inviting, like a park. On the near side, our side, was half a mile or so of very high yellow grass. Harry stopped the car and stood up with the glasses again. He swept the valley from lake to undetermined end.

  “Rather a busy plot,” he said casually. “I spy a small herd of buffalo just past that copse of trees down by the water’s edge. There is a cow rhino just there in the center, with a three-quarter-grown calf. There are two bull rhinos having a hell of a set-to over there to the left in the high grass. There’s at least one other rhino over to the right, under the trees at the bottom of the big hill. Seems a likely enough choice for a spot of amusement.”

  He started the car and drove, seemingly aimlessly, toward the general melee. We had come close to the two bull rhinos that were making all sorts of ugly noises in the grasses. You could hear them grunt when they met under full steam. They made sounds I had never heard. It was somewhere between a roar and a growl and a snarl and a gurgle and a grunt and a squeal. You could follow them through the grasses. They would square off, turn, run in opposite directions, and then come together with a smack, like a couple of heavy trucks colliding. The tickbirds, temporarily deprived of roosts, hovered around the battling pair, screaming helplessly.

  One of the bulls backed out into the open, bleeding a little, but not seriously wounded, and the other followed him. Harry grunted disgustedly. “Neither worth a damn,” he said. “Young fellows. Neither one’ll go bett
er than fourteen inches. Waste of time to fuss with them. Especially in this high grass. Better horn, I’d either drive them out of the grass or risk going in after them. But you don’t want either of those fellows. Oho! Here come the buffalo. Keep a sharp lookout, and if there’s a decent bloke among ’em, we’ll collect him later.”

  The rhinos had gone back into the grass and were having at each other again. The buffalo, spooked by our noise and the scent, were running the only way they could run—straight past us. The herd was bearing down directly on us. Harry had stopped the jeep. She was idling. We all stood up. It was quite a sight if you do not have to see it every day.

  The young rhino bulls were clashing and banging heartily. The buffalo streamed past us like maverick freight cars, low and bulky and long, their legs too short for the lengthy barrel of their bodies. They were a touch smaller than the Grumeti buff, and a peculiar reddish black. They came past us, flirting froth, walling their eyes, pounding through the grass with their sentinel egrets flying fighter cover over them and screaming profanely. One bull passed within a few feet. I could almost have poked him with the gun.

  “Bloody awful,” Selby said scornfully. “Not a decent head amongst ’em. Can’t imagine what turns ’em red, unless there’s a lot of iron in the earth about here. The zebras are reddish, too, you’ve noticed. The ostriches are lighter. Even the wildebeest— if you’ll look at that fresh herd—are buff colored.”

  We looked at the fresh herd. Approximately fifteen hundred wildly head-tossing wildebeests bore down on us in the trail that the buffalo had left in the high grass. Snorting and pawing when they saw the jeep, they split around us and hightailed after the buffalo into the narrow end of the valley.

  The two male rhinos continued to batter each other a hundred yards away.

  “Jesus,” said Virginia.

  “Let’s go and pay a call on the lady rhino in the valley,” Harry said brightly, and spun the jeep toward the cow with the calf as big as she was. The other rhino—the one at the edge of the hill—had climbed upward and had disappeared.

  The lady with the large child was in obviously a surly mood. She took one look at the jeep and charged. Baby, about two and one half tons of Baby, took us on a quartering shot. Harry hit the accelerator and we passed between them. Cow stopped. Baby stopped.

  “Hapana,” Harry said. “No good, either. Got a horn like a bloody banana. Let’s have a bit of fun, though, so Mama can take a picture.”

  Harry used the jeep much as a bullfighter uses his muleta, to take the beast past him on quick swerves. The only difference was that we were all in the muleta. The old cow wouldn’t quit. She came down on us in a fury, with Junior logging knots alongside her, and every time her stubby horn dropped for the uphook at the rear end of Jessica, Selby would spin right or left or put on a spurt of speed and leave the old lady with her forelegs spraddled and her dignity in a frightful state of frazzle. She made one last desperate, vengeful pass, missed us by six feet, and went grumbling off into the bush at full gallop, with Junior right on her tail. The young bulls ceased fighting and took off after her.

  I had been bracing Virginia against the windscreen, pressing on the seat of her pants while she sighted the Cine-Kodak. When the rhinos chuffed off, I relaxed and let her slip back onto the cushion. Her face was pale, and you might have scraped her eyes off with spoons.

  “Get a lot of good pictures?” Harry asked.

  “If you mean close ones, I did,” she said. “That old slut had her snout right in the spare tire a couple of times. Oh, my God.”

  She turned and pointed the snout of the camera at me. It was still full of the tissue paper with which she so carefully had packed the lens to keep it from getting dust-smeared or scratchy.

  “By God you’re a great photographer,” I said. “You forget to point it at the lions, and when we raise you some playful rhinos and buffalo and lay them right in your lap, you forget to take the blinders off that gadget. I wonder why you bother to bring it along.”

  “It is just that I am not used to being charged by rhinos and lions every day,” Virginia said with that watch-out-I-amabout-to-be-a-woman-and-cry expression. “God damn it,” she said, “you two idiots may be a couple of Tarzans, but it is going to take some time to make a Jane out of me. Stop the car. I got to go to the ladies’ room.”

  “There’s a nice bush,” Harry said. “Carry on.”

  Virginia came back from her bush and we shoved the jeep on toward the point under Maji Moto. The ground was soggy. It got soggier. We pushed Jessica as far as she could go. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun had finally come clearly from the clouds. It was very hot and bright. A small hesitant breeze was blowing, and tsetses had knocked off for lunch. Ahead of us was a mile of marsh. Beyond the marsh was a patch of nasty-looking scrub thorn. On the sheer side of Maji Moto you could see the little waterfalls glimmer as they ran down through the trees and rocks to cut small channels across the beach and into the lake. Around the patch of scrub, about two miles away, a third headland jutted. Selby used the glasses again.

  “Seems to be a couple of rhinos in the middle of that last meadow,” he said. “Just off that big point of rock. And what looks to be a sizable herd of buffalo down by the water’s edge off the point of trees. Tell you what. It’s two or three miles down there, at least, and the going’s pretty mean. I know those legs of yours are pretty dicky. Suppose you sit here with the memsaab, and I’ll just slip down and check the horns. If they look like anything at all, I’ll shoot Kidogo back for you and you can come and collect it. No use wearing out your legs for nothing. We’re going to need them when we go after the kudu.”

  This was fine. The breeze was getting brisker, and I had a paperback, two-bit detective story and a bar of candy in my jacket pocket.

  “Proceed, son,” I said. “And don’t forget your calipers. We don’t want to make any quarter-inch mistakes on horn size. Be sure you get good and close now. None of this slipshod stalking.”

  Harry grinned. Kidogo fished the .450 out of the case again, and they swung off, long strides and easy, through the marsh grass and the muck. As they entered the scrub of thorn, I saw Harry take the big gun from the bowlegged Nandi bearer. He was carrying it at half-ready, diagonally across his chest. They disappeared. The wind was my way. There weren’t any shots.

  A little later I had a message that informed me that a certain amount of intestinal frustration was no longer frustrated. I snapped the .470 together and went off to find my own bush. I leaned the gun against a stone and became a vastly happier man. When I got back to the car my wife was— livid.

  “You leave me alone in the car with this Kikuyu zootsuiter,” she yelled. “You leave me alone with no big guns, and you say nothing will happen. I can’t shoot worth a damn and Chabani can’t shoot nothin’. You send me off behind strange bushes when I got to go, in a place that’s lousy with big ugly animals. I see the brave Selby take his gun when he passes through the same kind of bush I go unarmed to the toilet in. And when you—you—you—when you have to go to the john, you unlimber an elephant gun and take it with you! This one I am not likely to forget soon. ‘Nothing to hurt you, Virginia,’” she mimicked. “‘Just go over behind that bush. Don’t worry about snakes. It’s all right about the rhino. Just sit still and they’ll go away.’ But my hero takes his gun to his alfresco men’s room. Wait’ll I tell this around Toots Shor’s when we get back. They’ll read you out of the Campfire Club.”

  I calmed her down some and went to sleep in the sun, with a handkerchief over my face. When I woke up, Harry and Kidogo had popped into sight. They looked cheerful. Harry waved an arm and beckoned, the way he had beckoned when he went to look at buffalo at Ikoma and had found an outcast bull that pleased him. I picked up the blunderbuss and cut an eye at the old lady.

  “Pray don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll sit here in this zoo with nothing bigger than a .30-’06, and Chabani and I will swap recipes until you get back. If you do
n’t find anything more than a few scraps of flesh when you return, you’ll know I died trying to save Chabani for the Communists to corrupt. I’ll just be fine.”

  “For Christ sake stay in the car,” I said. “This place is crawling with rhinos. If you need us, shoot a gun. We’ll hear you. Try not to hit anything with it, though. Only serves to make ’em angry.”

  I walked off to meet Harry and Kidogo, with Adam following behind. The ground was oozy and watery and I sank up to the calves. The marsh grass, taut across the path, tripped you at every step. You could avoid falling down only by lifting your feet exaggeratedly high in a sort of goose step. This was fine for a left leg that had been painstakingly rebuilt by an excellent Washington doctor but which lacked a certain number of blood vessels and nerves from its original quota.

  Halfway to the patch of scrub, Harry and Kidogo were waiting.

  “There’s a couple of bulls up there in the meadow,” Harry said. “I stalked up on one who looked rather a decent sort. Couldn’t see his horn very well, but I’d hazard that it’s better than twenty. The other one fed off into the edge of the bush. But there’s twelve or fourteen bull buffaloes there, too, and you could use a better buff if we miss on the faro. Let’s go.”

  The walking wasn’t much better after we left the marsh. Both of us took guns as we threaded, half crouching, through the narrow elephant path in the bush. Harry grimaced to his right and pointed with his chin. “Spooked a small herd of elephant as we went through,” he whispered. “Shouldn’t care to meet one close up under these conditions. Too thick.”